The Fool's Errand to Topple Assad

His June 2012 article – Stay Out of Syria. Foreign intervention to topple Bashar al-Assad’s bloody regime risks a fiasco on par with Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why Syria is the Gordian knot of Obama’s anti-ISIL campaign
By Joshua Landis | Al Jazeera | Sept. 15, 2014 |

Gulf countries reportedly poured money into the Islamic Front until the U.S. convinced them to stop. Islamic Front leaders decried democracy as the “dictatorship of the strong” [source MEMRI] and called for building an Islamic state. Zahran Alloush, the military chief of the Islamic Front spooked Americans by insisting that Syria be “cleansed of Shias and Alawites.” The newly appointed head of Ahrar al-Sham and the political chief of the Islamic Front earned his stripes in the ranks of the Iraqi insurgency fighting the U.S.

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Last year the U.S. tried to unite Western-friendly militias under a supreme military command, but that effort proved a debacle. In December the Islamic Front overran the supreme military command of the Free Syrian Army and ransacked its numerous warehouses and depots, making off with large stashes of U.S. and Saudi supplies. The U.S.-backed fighters were hogtied and left in their underwear. When U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford requested that the Islamic Front return the stolen items, he received no response.

No less that three commanders profess to be the rightful supreme military leader of the Western-backed Free Syrian Army — and all decry Obama for having betrayed them. He has not exactly heaped praise on the group either, claiming it was a “fantasy” that the group of “doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth” could overthrow Assad.

Obama has been in no hurry to arm the rebels or bet on them. The half-billion dollars he has requested for their training is chump change if it’s intended to create a force capable of taking on Assad’s military. The U.S. spent hundreds of billions to build the Iraqi army, which nonetheless crumbled in the face of ISIL.

Beyond the competence and orientation of rebel groups, there’s substantial division between the U.S. and its allies on the question of goals in Syria. Obama has made clear he envisages supporting the rebels only insofar as they fight the ISIL and secure areas from which it has been driven; he will not support their war to overthrow Assad. Despite insisting that Assad has no legitimacy and must step aside, Obama supports a political solution in Syria. That position makes sense for U.S. interests but not to Syrian rebels.

Washington wants to contain Syria’s violence in Syria. If rebel forces overran the key cities that remain under regime control — Damascus, Hama, Latakia, Jable, Banyas, Tartus and Suwayda — a second tsunami of refugees would pour out of Syria, threatening the stability of neighbors.

And with the regime having been built around Alawite supremacy and the armed rebellion being overwhelmingly composed of Sunnis, the civil war is being fought on sectarian lines, and prospects for a political solution short of partition remain remote.